I'm all in favor of tank balancing, and I've posted many times on the potential for paladin self-healing to be a serious survivability problem (and I've done quite a bit of math on the survivability and threat aspects of it, so I'm not just making it up out of thin air). But was this really the only way to solve the problem?

I'm absolutely aware of what's going on and how its liable to cause balancing issues, but

#1 - isn't the problem really the sheer size of WoG, rather than the shield? The stam scaling buff on Beta is an incisive way of shifting gameplay towards your stated design goals by moving the survivability balance towards managing sustained dts/hps and away from mitigating burst. Allowing WoG to create a shield is largely a burst management tool. The shield only lasts 5 seconds, and really it doesn't have that much in common with DK blood shield (which I assume you're fiddling with behind the scenes, and some sort of parity with it is a factor i this).

#2 - To the extent that the shield is a problem, isn't it really just because WoG is too powerful? Having it first scale with AP and then scale with Vengeance inflated AP makes it capable of throwing out some extremely strong heals. Wouldn't making WoG scale with either just SP or at a minimum not be affected by Vengeance solve the problem in a much cleaner fashion?

#3 - Really, its not so much that WoG is OP (well, ok, it is a little but not entirely) as that threat is such a non-issue right now (because of Vengeance making threat irrelevant after the first 30 seconds) that the threat vs survivability trade-off from ShoR is a no brainer. If you've got a gigantic, insurmountable lead in threat, then why not swap to WoG? This isn't a problem with WoG, this is a problem with threat balancing.

PotI being nerfed I understood. In addition to being OP, it encouraged some weird gameplay and rotations. If anything, it probably needs to have its base nerfed further (holy pallies are pretty durable right now) but given a little better scaling with SP.

But this makes me sad. This was a cool mechanic that gave you just a little control (especially after pally shields were taken away in 4.0.1) over your mitigation and now its going away. There are plenty of other things you could have done (and probably should do anyway) to keep tank balance in-line. Strip out self-healing from SoI (or give it a cap on how high the self-heal proc can be for if its needed for leveling or something. Like procing for a max of 200 would keep it useful while making it not worth using for level 85 tanks), make WoG scale with SP or at least not with Vengeance. And have Vengeance cap at 5% of health rather than 10%.

/sad

Edit - To be clear, I'm glad that you've allowed us to play with WoG-tanking for as long as you have. I'm just sad that it feels like there were solutions available that didn't take away interesting mechanics.

We changed rank 1 of Guarded by the Light to provide the Holy Shield functionality and buff Word of Glory a little bit. Rank 2 provides the overheal shield functionality and buffs Word of Glory a bit more.